In the Air – Art+Auction's Gossip Column

There was a time when artists were artists, taking up residence in sprawling Massachusetts colonial homes, dressing up elegantly, and sculpting while the sunlight shone. That bygone era has been recreated for a Vogue photo shoot by Annie Liebovitz on the theme of author Edith Wharton’s life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Alongside a bevy of famous contemporary authors starring as Wharton’s literary friends, painter Nate Lowman plays sculptor Daniel Chester French.

In the photograph (shown at top), Lowman appears in a rumpled blue shirt, tightly cinched bowtie and elegant suit pants, standing pensively in front of a portrait bust in progress. The artist’s signature hair remains tousled. Lowman has big shoes to fill — French himself was an American sculptor who created the full-length portrait of Abraham Lincoln that now sits in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. He died in 1931.